In a march themed with fanciful allusions to Little Red Riding Hood, thousands of protestors swarmed Hong Kong’s streets on Sunday in the first large display of protest since the city’s elite tapped a Beijing ally to become the Chinese territory’s next leader.

Leung Chun-ying, who is seen as having close ties to China’s Communist Party, has been nicknamed a “wolf” by local media. Protestors worry that he will weaken Hong Kong’s traditional commitment to civil liberties and freedom of speech, though Mr. Leung has adamantly maintained he will maintain the city’s core values.

On Sunday afternoon, protestors carried a giant replica of a wolfskin, and many of the women wore red scarves, in a nod to the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale. Thousands of protesters surged through the streets, shouting pro-democracy slogans, some of them wearing spray-painted models of tanks fashioned out of cardboard in a reference to the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident. Mr. Leung was selected for his post by a majority of the 1,200-member election committee. Beijing has promised the Chinese territory universal suffrage by 2017.

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Organizer estimates placed attendance at 15,000, though the police said there were closer to 5,000 in attendance. The messages were pro-democracy and anti-Mr. Leung, while protestors were also vocal about Hong Kong’s yawning wealth gap, now the biggest in Asia. “Poor people are getting poorer,” said one 60-year-old female protestor surnamed Ma. “I have less and less hope for Hong Kong.”

The protesters’ destination was the central government’s liaison office, which reportedly lobbied the city’s election committee in advance of Mr. Leung’s victory. However, police had blocked off the entrance to the building with barriers, and refused to let protesters get too near. At one point, after a standoff that went on for hours into the evening, witnesses said roughly a dozen protestors were pepper-sprayed for trying to get too close to the entrance.

“The Chinese government’s interference shows us that ‘one country, two systems’ is truly broken,” said Tsang Chun-ying, 23, whose eyes were red and still smarting after being pepper-sprayed.

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